


Method Acting

by tobinlaughing



Series: Acting Classes [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012), Thor (Movies)
Genre: AIM - Freeform, Corporate Espionage, Evil Corporations, F/M, Gen, Possible AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-01
Updated: 2013-06-01
Packaged: 2017-12-13 16:28:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/826364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tobinlaughing/pseuds/tobinlaughing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Don't get me wrong--I loves me some Darcy/Clint fic and Darcy Lewis in a general kind of way. Jane Foster trusts her an awful lot. </p><p>I'm just sayin'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Method Acting

Konstantin Stanislavski established his Method for Realistic Acting in the early years of the 20th century, codifying a curriculum of study of emotional memory and character-driven truth for those with whom he worked at the Moscow Art Theatre. A character's motivations, actions, reactions, and idiosyncrasies had to stem from a place of truth: the actor had to believe in everything that the character was compelled to do, thus reflecting the reality of daily life, of inhabitation of that character. Stanislavski's students study emotional memories, physical impetus, and bare their souls to a driving question known, rather simplistically, as the 'magic if'. 

Emma's "magic if" started out as, "what IF the perfect student aid existed for Dr Foster just when she needed her?"...but had to quickly change to something simpler. More like, "what IF I was the only applicant?"

It had been laughably, almost suspiciously simple to divert the other interested applicants for the internship to a dummy address, both physical and electronic. Changing the adverts, fliers, and postings on web-boards had felt like a deliberate return to the basic exercises of her training days, not so much like the foundation for a sensitive op by a skilled operative. But she'd done it, telling herself every step of the way that she was getting off easy, that there wasn't any chance anyone, even a pure academic like Jane Foster, could believe that an internship with a highly respected astrophysicist was going to go almost unnoticed in any of the journals or publications in which her ads appeared. 

And yet. 

Foster had turned AIM down twice: a big no-no in Killian's book. The third refusal would result in her quiet death, or not-so-quiet, depending on Killian's mood that day; Killian had, for once, decided to be subtle about his offer and try to hook Foster with a sweeter deal than he'd previously put forth. Emma's superobjective--her driving desire before, during, and through the close of the operation--was to hook Foster's cooperation with AIM, either explicitly or in a more convoluted manner. Erik Selvig had been brought up as a potential asset in the operation, but dismissed as too scatterbrained and ineffectual to follow through on much of his work or his projects. He was to escape the op unscathed if possible, but if not....well, Killian didn't particularly care one way or the other how Selvig ended up. Emma didn't want to kill the kindly older man, whom she thought of as a kind of floppy, well-worn pet-professor, but she wouldn't be adverse to putting foxglove in his tea, either. 

Darcy Lewis had been an easy construct, if a long one: average high-school grades and a surprising scholarship opportunity had to be forged, along with enough invented community-college credits to land her in her sophomore year at Culver. A personality was no problem; girls these days were unhesitatingly unremarkable, each one a special snowflake churned out by the conveyor-belt machine of Title IX, Girl Scouts, PowerPuff and TankGrrls, and underfunded arts and music programs in the public schools. Darcy was just as quirky, bohemian, and lazily political as every other girl on her dorm floor, shopping at thrift stores to show her "raised poor'' sensibilities and wearing bulky lines and flashy colors to reflect a personality with as much depth as a kindergartener's watercolor. Emma had carefully studied every co-ed around her, tightening the weave of Darcy's emotional memories until she achieved the appropriate degree of controlled spontaneity in her actions, reactions, and movements. Two semesters at Culver had honed the character to smooth, appropriately-flawed perfection: Darcy was in turns butch and delicate, ghetto and entitled, polite and pushy, and just interesting enough in her classes that her teachers wouldn't hesitate to write her a recommendation to Foster's internship. Really, rerouting all the other applicants had just been...practice. A precaution.

Phase 2 of the op couldn't have gone more perfectly: unlimited access not only to Jane Foster's data, equipment, and theories, but to the doctor herself, who simply assumed her research was safe because no one else could possibly understand it and therefore wouldn't be interested. Darcy recorded hours and hours of Foster's _sotto voce_ musings and speculations, encoding each chunk of audio and video before sending it off in a myriad of directions to her AIM handlers. Thumbdrives with copies of Jane's notes and data collected were shipped out weekly: if nothing else, the good doctor was prolific. SHIELD's showing up hadn't even been a red flag. Their op lead had been interested in the data and equipment, not Foster herself: Darcy passed under their radar, putting up complaints about her iPod as a running gag to amuse herself. When Asgard showed up in force, Emma took 5 seconds to break character, do a happy dance, and then slip back into Darcy again: she would _have_ to get herself attached to Dr Foster and ensure her participation in Phase 3. Emma carefully packed away the first ''magic IF'' and replaced it with "what IF an ordinary schoolgirl got thrown into this extraordinary life?"

Tromso had been a delay, not a setback: a valuable chance to mine data from not only Foster, but from SHIELD that had set itself up all around her. Emma hadn't even regretted missing the action with the aliens: she was a spy, not a soldier. Let someone else do the fighting and dying. 

Barton had been a test. A delicious, muscle-flexing arrow-shooting Old-Spice-smelling knife-fighting test of all of her careful constructs of the Darcy cover...and he'd come with a paranoid partner straight out of 2R. Emma read them like a pop-up book the second Barton winked at her in the lobby of Stark Tower and Natasha quirked an eyebrow: he would show interest, she'd do the background digging, and when Darcy's credentials--or the comforting lack thereof--and history were laid bare, they'd both relax their guard. For as deadly as Hawkeye and Black Widow were, individually and as a team, they had one major weakness, shared almost across the entire SHIELD network: they believed in the organization. They might not agree with every op; they might not like everyone they had to work with; they might not like the situations in which they were placed....but they believed in the big picture, in what SHIELD did, and because of that they wouldn't continue to question anyone who made it past the initial vetting process. They trusted their sources, believed in the wisdom of their supervisors, and worked their own little superiority complex into the good and righteous work they did for their secretive quasi-government organization.

Thus passed the first week. 

Darcy flirted with Barton, using Thor's return from Asgard (and his enthusiastic courting and seducing of her boss) as an excuse to slip away with the off-duty agent and tease the glowing embers of interest into a steady, red flame of protectiveness. Of course Darcy was safer with him; why would a quasi-poli-sci student who wore bulky sweaters and Converse have any idea of how to defend herself? Wasn't her snarky helplessness cute? Didn't she have all sorts of Facebook-political-research and a hard drive full of Wikipedia-sourced articles on why Monsanto was the devil and guns were bad to back up their late-night latte-fueled debates? When he finally coaxed her to the training center, her initial ineptitude was expected and accepted, although Emma allowed Darcy to show a growing aptitude for some of the more basic physical exercises. And when he coaxed her into bed, her passionate fascination with making him moan only played right into his fantasies for her. Hot Librarian and Sexy Research Assistant were at the top of his list, and Emma made sure that Darcy indulged him to sweating perfection. When Clint trusted a person, he trusted completely--more of that smug superiority and trust in SHIELD's security--and Emma spent long nighttime hours watching him sleep, drooling a little with his head tilted back, neck exposed, a pillow knotted under his shoulders, completely oblivious. Darcy, of course, was a light sleeper. She'd wake him if there was anything wrong.

Thus passed the first year.

The order to expand her data-mining operation to include the rest of the Avengers had stymied her for all of three days before the addition of a few simple lines of code into one of JARVIS' maintenance systems started funneling data to her personal hard drive. JARVIS defragged itself every eleven hours on the main Tower system and every three hours on Stark's personal network; it was a simple thing to gather those fragments and track the changes to their parent programs with each maintenance cycle. Stark would never find the code because JARVIS didn't know the code was there. Emma received a surreptitious kudos from her supervisors when Pepper Potts' hard drives showed up in her data cache.

Then the Mandarin debacle went down, and Emma had to fuel Darcy up for a few white-knuckled nightmares that reinforced Clint's protective nature and the idea that Darcy was just as committed to SHIELD and Dr Foster and the Avengers as he was to SHIELD and Fury and the Avengers. A familiar and trusted face around the Tower (a 'civvie girlfriend' as Captain Rogers put it, and wasn't _he_ a surprise and a temptation! Emma allowed herself a few moments' pride when she stopped herself from seducing the good Captain. He wouldn't trust someone who cheated on his teammate, even if she cheated with him), the other Avengers accepted Darcy's desire to protect _them_ with good humor, support, and not a little patronizing laughter. Perfectly, according to plan, and just as Emma knew they would. 

Pop-up books, all of them. Some with interesting hidden tabs, flaps, and folds with surprises and pictures, but as simple to read as any average New Yorker. In fact, the average New Yorker probably set up a more thorough cover than the Avengers did: normal people had secrets and habits and hobbies to hide. These so-called superheroes didn't feel the need to hide, well, _anything_. Emma wondered how they could maintain the fiction of their superiority with so many glaring holes in their security systems and covers, and decided that their very uniqueness, as individuals and as a team, was what crippled them the most. They believed in the rule of law and their exclusion from it. They believed in SHIELD and the privileges that gave them. And best of all, they believed Darcy was a smart little cog in the greater SHEILD wheel and wholly and completely on their side. 

Emma had settled in for the long haul at year three: Darcy received her degree in poli-sci from Culver _in absentia_ , qualifying her for more advanced administrative training within the SHIELD system; still acting as Dr Foster's research assistant and general handler (yet another genius who had to be reminded to put down the mass spectrometer and eat a damn sandwich), Darcy's training allowed her greater access to information on clearance levels that Emma had hacked eighteen months before. Of course Darcy kept their trust. Emma had already seen and sent on a lot of what she was now able to access from her workstation in the lab. When the call came in to finish up and pull out, she was almost disappointed.

 _"I assumed I was to be a permanent miner in this particular lode?"_ she typed, sitting at a Starbucks on Staten Island. Foster was working on turning her research papers into a book, with Thor's help, and had given Darcy the afternoon off; she'd picked a tiff with Clint that morning as an excuse to escape the Tower. She typed busily on her laptop, but the words didn't matter; what was transmitted was the coded sequence of keystrokes. Morse code in the digital age.

 _"Your work within Stark Industries and SHIELD has yielded better results than we could have ever hoped,"_ her supervisor replied. _"However, the failure of the Extremis Project has realigned certain objectives. Foster no longer a priority. You will be extracted from your current cover in the next four days. No replacement agent will be assigned. Exit strategy is up to you._ "

Even with the confidence her supervisor implied in that allowance, Emma wished he'd given her more notice. Four days was not a lot of time. She would be limited to the traumatic or dastardly when improvising her exit strategy, if she didn't want to completely blow AIM's cover here at SHIELD. She couldn't just disappear; Darcy was far too young to retire gracefully, and in the middle of a steady relationship with Barton, she'd have to somehow extricate herself without arousing his or his partner's suspicions. 

_"Exfil?"_  
 _"You are expected in Toronto at the end of the week. Transmit new ID for transport when ready. Clean sweep of all contacts. Good work_ ".

A clean sweep. Great. Almost impossible: if Clint thought for even a moment that he could avenge her death or rescue her from a kidnapper, she'd never lose him. Natasha would be just as unshakable. Double that if either of them cottoned on to her status as a double agent....

It took the better part of a day to compose the incriminating evidence and lay the electronic groundwork for her extraction. The maintenance code had to be carefully pulled, a slender thread from a vast weaving, with JARVIS none the wiser that it'd ever been there. When she was gone, the mined data would have nowhere to go, and a backlog could compile itself in one of JARVIS' memory banks. JARVIS would investigate as a part of his normal maintenance routine, and alert SHIELD/Stark to the possible leak, thus compromising any future plans to mine either system.

Threats had to be planted in a number of places: scattered through a months-long backtrack of her Twitter and Facebook feeds, planted in her spam filter in her work email, and posted on Tumblr account she'd created, kept for six months, and then abandoned more than a year ago. Emma made a phone call. 

The second day, she made up with Clint, cooked for Foster, and caught a movie with the Avengers in the Tower's common room. Natasha didn't join them; her name had come up for a long-term assignment in Saudi Arabia, tracking an asset in a Prince's harem. It was the best Emma could do on short notice.

That night, as she and Clint lay in bed, him completely sated and sprawled trustingly over more than his share of the mattress, Emma took a moment to extricate herself from Darcy and Darcy's feelings about him. Darcy had loved him; Emma found him useful, entertaining at times, and mostly just necessary. With the end of this assignment, he was no longer a necessity. 

Natasha would follow her, try to find her. She was on radio silence for a week, though, and Barton wasn't on her mission; that would give Emma a good head start and if that wasn't enough...well, this wouldn't be her first plastic surgery, would it? Darcy's story was over. There wasn't any need for this costume any more.

Darcy kissed Barton's bared shoulder, and Emma slipped a tiny tablet into his mouth before swiftly escaping the room via the balcony. He swallowed reflexively, coughed, and startled awake just long enough to realize that something was wrong. By that time the paralytic had reached his heart and Emma was in a cab, racing to La Guardia.

Clean sweep.


End file.
